Digital photo image processing is a rapidly growing technology area. Photographic images may be uploaded as a digital file to a computer using a digital camera or a scanned image appearing on paper or photographic film, for example. The uploaded digital image may thereafter be further digitally processed as desired. Present day photo processing software allows extensive modifications to be either automatically or selectively made to a digital image to improve clarity and color balance, to remove unwanted matter (e.g., “red-eye”) and to change the digital frame size to any desired print size, for example. The image processing may be done by the user using image processing software on their personal computer or at a photo kiosk, or a customer may upload the digital image over the Internet to be processed by a photofinishing service, for example. A photofinishing service can modify, print and mail (or otherwise make available) the desired prints or other product having the image thereon (e.g., mugs, blankets, CDs, etc.) to the user/customer. Therefore, a user thus has many options as to how their digital images are ultimately converted to photographs or other image-bearing products (hereinafter collectively referred to as “prints”).
Digital image processing systems are known which automatically detect a region of interest in a digital image such as a person's face or eyes, for example, see U.S. Pat. No. 6,577,751 to Fuji Photo Film Co., Ltd., the entire disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference. In such digital image processing systems having automatic red eye correction, the red eye detection and correction steps are carried out by the system without user input. The red eye correction step does not change the raw image data which remains unchanged. Rather, the red eye correction is implemented on the displayed image. The red eye correction may thus be considered as a second digital layer over the first raw digital image layer. Prints of the digital image are generally productions of the digital image as displayed, thus including the second digital layer.
It is possible for the system to incorrectly identify a red object as a red eye region and implement a red eye correction on the displayed image leading to an incorrect digital print and customer dissatisfaction. It would therefore be desirable from a customer satisfaction standpoint to have a digital image processing system that allows a user to selectively edit corrections carried out automatically by the system. It would furthermore be desirable to have a system that generates a preview image including a low resolution version of the image and metadata representing the corrected area(s) of the image such that the original image does not have to be reanalyzed by the system each time a user switches between viewing the image with corrections applied and not applied.